Poetry

Berssenbrugge’s 12th collection raises mere expression to the level of vital hymn, as her discursive poems tackle topics like time, the environment, perception and beingness. In an age of intense debate about fracking and climate change, Berssenbrugge’s lines — saturated with the hallucinatory speed of thought — have the urgency of a manifesto; she consistently calls attention to the interrelatedness of all things (especially roses). “I connect with sensation now as to pink petals forming toward me, those who love me in another life responding to me. / There’s no time, so at sunset love from others can look like one rose.” Although strongly associated with a postmodern experimentalism, Berssenbrugge evokes the Romantics’ worship of nature, going them one better — her narrators consult the natural world: “I ask a plant with dusty gray leaves for inspiration.” Yet she never indulges in extreme awe or passionate wonder. Plaintive and mildly amused, her poems are deeply ecological even when they’re about fashion or amphibians: “Frogs communicate para-acoustically with the future, grabbing the potential beat (silence) and materializing it from far off in light years.” Such deep-forest loftiness has its skeptics. Whereas Wordsworth heard the “still, sad music of humanity,” Berssenbrugge would be hard pressed to notice other people walking along the mesa. However, few living poets are as able to enter headlong into the spiritual state of our environment and its endangerment. Ethereal and metaphysical, “Hello, the Roses” presents one of the best minds in modern poetry. Who cares if she doesn’t greet you on the hiking trail?

It’s no surprise that the author of the best book on Bob Marley’s lyrics is also a great poet. Dawes’s verse has an expressive power and lyric resonance that can be attributed to a trans-Atlantic consciousness weaned on the spiritual sources of reggae. Over several decades, the Ghanaian-born, Jamaican-raised poet, educator, editor, novelist and playwright (who now lives in America and has strong ties to Britain) has written some 16 books of poetry. This collection, named for a Marley song, gathers Dawes’s best work and represents his most substantial publication to date in the United States. In “Shook Foil” — a cheeky, witty response to the Gerard Manley Hopkins poem “God’s Grandeur” — a man walking along Kingston Harbor, “drunk with the slow mugginess / of a reggae bassline, finding its melody / in the mellow of the soft earth’s breath,” finds grace in the “silver innards of discarded / cigarette boxes” he stumbles across. It is emblematic of Dawes’s literary and cultural reach. Whether writing about Jamaican AIDS patients or Jim Crow segregation, he summons a strong sense of righteousness and a stark social awareness. He also revels in the indissoluble properties of song, as in a sonnet narrated in the voice of Frederick Douglass: “I can tell the spirits rising / are old as dirt, old as my skin, and my heart / swells to know that these white folks / will see how we have come so far, / how we can call on ghosts to choke / the beasts that held us back so long.”

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BELMONTPoemsBy Stephen BurtGraywolf, paper, $15.

Burt lives in the wealthy Boston suburb of Belmont — hence the title of his third book of poetry — but don’t worry: This prodigiously gifted critic is shrewd enough, and self-aware enough, to avoid the familiar terrain of conformity and spruced-up yards. Instead, he complicates the suburbs we know from John Cheever’s stories and movies like “American Beauty” by suggesting the way out of malaise is to celebrate residents’ liberating desires and obsessions, not least his own. So along with poems about fathering a precocious son you’ll find Burt rhapsodizing about rock bands, the Victorian photographer Lady Clementina Hawarden, the iconic Citgo sign of Kenmore Square and visits to the local sex shop. Which isn’t to say he’s not alert to the seductions and dangers of convention. In one of the book’s best poems, “Belmont Overture (Poem of Eight A.M.),” he writes: “We have learned to carry, everywhere, sunscreen, / and insect repellent, and pretzel sticks, and Aquafor. / . . . We mean / it when we say we like it; we feel sure / it’s safe around here, and once we feel safe, it’s our nature / to say we’re unsatisfied, and pretend to seek more.” Despite occasionally commonplace lines (“in a world built only for children, who keep going wrong, / . . . the only real world is the one they have”), the collection is dominated by virtuosic turns and eclectic imaginings made all the more charming by Burt’s constant self-reflexive address to the reader as co-conspirator and part of his larger “we.” You’ll find “The Paraphilia Odes” a mini tour de force.

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SONG & ERRORPoemsBy Averill CurdyFarrar, Straus & Giroux, $23.

Writing sentences, for Curdy, must be on par with scoring a symphony for a quartet, except that the reader’s ear is both instrument and audience. Here’s the opening of “Northwest Passage”: “Standing on this deck I have watched / Morning’s first pale peach jeopardy / Of light flush alleys and rooftops, / Just touching my neighbors’ gardens, / Until they seethed like the green smoke / Of a new world.” I dare you to say it aloud and not feel the swish and momentum of vowels and consonants in your mouth. Throughout this long-­awaited debut, Curdy constructs a realistic surface of her inner life, whereby daily perceptions — mediated through her immersion in art and aesthetics, apocrypha, historical facts, classical literature and Americana — merge into a careful sounding of human redemption and grace. Although such richly textured poems might seem mere brocade, Curdy’s intellect is engaging enough that she never betrays her gift through ornamental pretension or prettified artifacts of language. “Another day, another dolor,” she writes in “Visiting the Largest Live Rattlesnake Exhibit in North America,” before observing, tartly, that “so many nocturnal predators together / Smell like a stranger on our parents’ pillow.” One has to believe such witty and unsentimental observations get at the substance and nuance of the natural order, or simply what it truly means to feel the world around us.

Major Jackson, the author of “Holding Company” and two other poetry collections, is a professor at the University of Vermont.